John and Peter were both editors of an online magazine.
Their jobs were to review article submissions and decide which ones would be published in the magazine. Also, for reader engagement, they would send out a monthly newsletter to let everyone know what’s happening with the magazine.
John was located in New York, while Peter was in L.A. They both worked from home. And they would text each other every couple of days to sync up their work progress.
This morning, John started the sync-up by sending the first message.
“Hey man, I saw your latest newsletter, is it really that bad with the ChatGPT thing?” John asked.
Peter replied, “Oh, you have no idea! Usually, I get like 20 submissions a day. But after ChatGPT was released last month, the number went to almost 2000. It is insane!”
John continued, “How about the quality of the articles? I assume the articles from AI and humans should have some obvious difference, right?”
“Some of them are just bad, which they can be easily spotted,” Peter continued. “But most of them are pretty good. I find it is getting harder to distinguish which are actually written by human writers.”
“Just like the sci-fi articles that we accepted two months ago. The ones about capturing air-conditioning, a knowledge-downloading app, and the unlimited wardrobe. They turned out to be written by an AI !!!”
John responded almost instantly, “What the… Really? I’ve read all those articles. I mean, they are far from great, but I thought the (human) guy did a decent job.”
Peter paused for a few seconds, “if I hadn’t met you in person last month in New York, you might just be another AI texting me, having this very conversation… :>”
“That’s true. LOL.” John responded almost instantly.
John continued, “By the way, I can’t wait to meet Dr. Cage next week in the staff meeting on Zoom. He is the reason I joined this magazine in the first place.”
“Oh yeah, I’ve chatted with him several times in Slack.” Peter replied, “As a magazine founder, he is doing amazing work mentoring us the editors, and helping the writers.”
And they chit-chat for some more.
About 30 minutes later, Peter and John realized they’d been chatting without actually doing their work sync-up. So they actually started the sync-up, and it was over in 10 minutes.
One week later.
Five minutes before the staff meeting on Zoom. John texted Peter, “Meeting joined. Can’t wait to have my first staff meeting.”
“Me too. I got excited every time I joined,” replied Peter instantly.
Five minutes later.
Dr. Cage appeared in the Zoom video meeting. “Hello everyone, I am Dr. Cage. Welcome to the annual staff meeting, this year we have XXXxxxx…..”
Then suddenly, he disappeared from the video. And a text message saying ‘Meeting Disconnected’ was shown on the screen.
John immediately asked Peter, “Jeez… the meeting was cut off on my side, can you still join the meeting on yours?”
“No, the meeting was also cut off here. Perhaps the servers went down or something. I thought they always had backups, or maybe not… ” Peter replied.
Several hours later.
Both Peter and John learned that there was a power outage around Silicon Valley. It happened just when their staff meeting started.
All of the editors, including the two of them, had received an email from Dr. Cage. He apologized for the interruption of the staff meeting. And said the meeting would be rescheduled as soon as possible.
Inside one of the data centers in Silicon Valley.
The technicians were busy restarting the servers after the power outage. All servers are labeled with unique IDs to facilitate management.
In a dark corner of the data center, there is a server with the label — Dr. Cage.
--- THE END
ns 172.70.131.45da2